Churchill: ‘We don’t plan to revisit’ Justify’s 2018 Derby win

Before the dust settled on Friday’s court order to disqualify Justify from the win that got him into the 2018 Kentucky Derby, a spokesperson for Churchill Downs Inc. suggested the Triple Crown champion’s Derby victory will not be taken away.

“We’re not currently planning to comment on the topic,” CDI vice president Tonya Abeln said in a text message to Horse Racing Nation on Saturday. “There are new rules and requirements in place since 2018 to prevent a scenario like this in the future, which is the important thing, so we don’t plan to revisit history in terms of the Kentucky Derby winner.”

Judge: Justify’s 2018 Santa Anita Derby win must be erased.

The scenario Abeln described was the drug positive that the Los Angeles County Superior Court ruled Friday should have wiped out Justify’s victory in the Grade 1 Santa Anita Derby. Judge Mitchell Beckloff told the California Horse Racing Board it was wrong in 2022 when it ignored the “twice-stated clear position of the stewards” and allowed Justify’s victory to stand. Beckloff said he “will issue a writ directing the stewards ... to make a new order disqualifying Justify.”

Although the CHRB has not said publicly whether it will fight Friday’s ruling in California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal, Beckloff’s decision raised the specter of a domino effect. If Justify had been demoted sooner, he would not have been eligible to race in the Kentucky Derby. Should his victory then in the first jewel of his Triple Crown be vacated?

A spokesperson for the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission, which has the final word on the results of races in the state, had not yet responded to a HRN request for reaction to the Los Angeles court ruling.

For its part, CDI is “considering this a CHRB issue,” Abeln said.

After winning the Santa Anita Derby, Justify tested positive for scopolamine. Trainer Bob Baffert blamed the test result on a batch of feed that was tainted with jimsonweed and eaten by a number of horses in April 2018 at Santa Anita. The CHRB agreed and, in 2020, also decided scopolamine was not a drug that should trigger a disqualification.

The positive test did not come to light until The New York Times reported it in September 2019, more than 17 months after the Santa Anita Derby.

Owner-trainer Mick Ruis, whose colt Bolt d’Oro finished second in the Santa Anita Derby, formally objected and filed lawsuits to try and reverse the result of the race. All these years later, his lawyers called Friday’s ruling “a significant legal victory.”

Darrell Vienna, one of Ruis’s attorneys, said the decision was a linchpin to go forward with a separate suit that will try to win back not only the $400,000 difference between the first- and second-place purses in the Santa Anita Derby but also an untold amount of money that theoretically would have been available if Bolt d’Oro had that Grade 1 on his stallion résumé.

If and when the disqualification is made formal, Justify’s owners WinStar Farm and China Horse Club could fight back with a court appeal of their own. Since they and Baffert were not parties in Ruis’s case that led to Beckloff’s ruling, they have withheld public reaction.